Jon Campbellhttp://joncampbell.org
Jon Campbell freelance reporter home pageSat, 21 Feb 2015 20:32:45 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1How a 50s-era Knife Law Sent Thousands of New Yorkers to Jail (Village Voice Cover Story)http://joncampbell.org/?p=984
http://joncampbell.org/?p=984#commentsSun, 01 Feb 2015 23:45:13 +0000http://joncampbell.org/?p=984BLADE STUNNER: How a ‘50s-era New York Knife Law Landed Thousands in Jail, Padded Stop and Frisk Numbers, and Brought Right and Left Together

In retrospect, Richard Neal knows he should have just gone home.

It was already nearly 4 a.m. on a sticky June night in 2008, and the LaGuardia Houses on the Lower East Side were crawling with cops. It was the kind of situation Neal normally prefers to avoid. Where police are, he’d rather not be.

A trim, soft-spoken 59-year-old, Neal has had his share of problems with the law. More than his share, in fact, as he’ll readily admit. He has spent nearly a quarter of his life in prison. There was a burglary charge in 1978, followed by an assault charge in 1982. A nonviolent drug-distribution charge in 2002 landed him back inside.

Today, he acknowledges these incidents with some regret, in a voice that’s incongruously deep and sometimes trails off mournfully. He especially regrets the crimes that involved hurting other people.

Stanley Cohen abruptly stops responding to voicemails. When you dial his cell, you hear the telltale sound of an overseas phone call, followed by a hold message in Arabic.

Cohen is known to friends and foes alike as an eccentric of the highest order, a foul-mouthed criminal-defense attorney with unruly gray hair, a Saddam Hussein-straight-out-of-the-spider-hole beard, and a long history of representing enemies of the people the world over. In a 2002 profile, the Washington Post‘s Richard Leiby described him as “possibly one of the most hated lawyers in [New York City].” In his Lower East Side apartment, which doubles as his office, he displays photos of himself wearing a wide grin alongside Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the Middle Eastern terrorist organization Hamas. Only weeks ago he wore a black-and-white-checked kaffiyeh for a press conference outside the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan where he’d just unsuccessfully defended Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the highest-ranking Al Qaeda member ever tried in a civilian court.

When you consider how many things can go wrong at a metal foundry, it’s a miracle that anything comes out right. The range of potential catastrophes is almost infinite. Molds crack, wax shatters; molten bronze does strange things at 1,700 degrees.

But a great many things came out right at Long Island City’s Empire Bronze Foundry in the 1980s, mostly because of Brian Ramnarine. The stout, thick-fingered artisan owned and operated the foundry for more than a decade, achieving a great deal of notoriety in the world of fine sculpture along the way. The role of a metal foundry is to execute an artistic work in perfect replica; to take an original form in clay or plaster or carved stone and render it in cold metal. And for a period beginning in the late ’80s and lasting through the late ’90s, only a few dozen artisans in the United States, maybe fewer, could handle bronze like Ramnarine.

As far as Angel Martinez was concerned, the police officer at the front desk that night wasn’t much more than an inconvenience. Sure, he’d refused to take Martinez’s complaint. He was even a little rude about it. But for Martinez, after a night in Queens central booking, with his face battered and welts blooming all over his body, that officer was an afterthought.

Martinez was more concerned about the other two cops. The ones he says kicked his ass for no good reason. The ones who’d approached him and started patting him down without a word of explanation. The ones who slammed his face into a parked car, then onto the sidewalk, when he objected. The ones who ruined the new plaid button-down he’d bought for a job interview earlier that day — torn it to shreds.

]]>http://joncampbell.org/?feed=rss2&p=9810LAPD Spied on 21 Using StingRay Anti-Terrorism Tool (from L.A. Weekly)http://joncampbell.org/?p=458
http://joncampbell.org/?p=458#commentsSun, 22 Dec 2013 16:31:59 +0000http://joncampbell.org/?p=458A secretive cellphone spy device known as StingRay, intended to fight terrorism, was used in far more routine LAPD criminal investigations 21 times in a four-month period during 2012, apparently without the courts’ knowledge that the technology probes the lives of non-suspects who happen to be in the same neighborhood as suspected terrorists.

This is a followup on a previous story, the first to reveal the LAPD’s use of this highly controversial technology.

The Long Beach Police Department press release in August 2010 was tellingly brief — just 121 words. Franklin Robles, 33, had been shot to death on his way to buy a used Cadillac, a possible robbery attempt turned bloody.

There was no suspect, no eyewitness. Investigators had little to go on — or so it appeared. What Long Beach detectives didn’t know the day of the murder was that the alleged getaway car had already been under police surveillance — before Robles’ murder was even contemplated.

Even at an organization like the VFW, even in a military town like San Diego, the news that former soldiers, sailors and marines are among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants deported every year can come as a surprise.

Unfortunately, production has not yet expanded beyond the five-gallon plastic bucket in my closet, so it won’t be hitting the market any time soon. (Unless any breweries out there want to license my label for this booming market segment. Start the bidding!) But I’m glad others in this business appreciate a little gallows humor. And while I don’t want to discourage any potential employers – feel free to toss any pity assignments my way – I am in fact still writing, and even enjoying the freelance life. Granted, the line between “freelance” and “unemployed” is sometimes blurry. But you get the idea.

Want to give full credit to Alberta Johnson, the photog who created the original image of this ink-stained wretch, and then very kindly let me use it. She’s really cool. Check out her other work here.

I was on San Diego’s PBS affiliate KPBS yesterday, discussing my recent piece for San Diego City Beat about the license plate reader system in San Diego County. Check out the TV segment below, it’s about 5 minutes long. I also had a chance to sit in on KPBS’ radio program Midday Edition for a little roundtable discussion about LPR in the County. Good stuff.

Here’s the radio segment, it runs about 12 minutes.KPBS Roundtable
(The full show, with great discussion about other local issues, is at the KPBS website here.)

Matt Sledge over at Huffington Post also had some observations about the City Beat story, and some of the views expressed in the comment section. Definitely worth a read.

The conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr. has done as much as anyone to clear the way for the flood of money pouring into this year’s election. As James Bennet tells us in his excellent Atlantic piece, Bopp is the legal mind behind the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and another influential 2007 ruling, which together helped weaken disclosure requirements for political giving and ushered in the unlimited corporate and union donations of the Super PAC era.

Here’s a riff on Bopp that Bennet didn’t touch on: his unusual relationship with the James Madison Center for Free Speech, a nonprofit organization he co-founded in 1997. As a charity, the organization doesn’t really exist, outside of a few tax records in an IRS file cabinet. In reality, Bopp is the Madison Center, and vice versa, and for more than 15 years, the Indiana-based charity has helped fund Bopp’s influential litigation by channeling tax-exempt, mostly anonymous donations to his for-profit law firm.